


Ex Post Facto

by Starherd



Series: Contractual Obligations [2]
Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Because nobody is okay with it, Flug is basically Centralia: brittle surface over a toxic never-ending fire, Hat Trick, How do I tag for OOC Black Hat without scaring people off, I didn't think I had a sequel But Then., I like-a more cheese too, Multi, Other, Starherd's Flug's-Bag-Is-A-Flat Headcanon, The most disturbing zombie apocalypse ever, You like-a more cheese?, Zombie Apocalypse, particularly not Black Hat himself
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:14:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24385666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starherd/pseuds/Starherd
Summary: Emergency Backup Flug unexpectedly wakes.  That would be bad enough, but it's nothing compared to the plague that's turned most of the people in the world into rage-zombies, and had a very different, and very unfortunate, effect on Black Hat.Flug was told to fix this, so that's what he's going to do.  Somehow.
Relationships: 5.0.5 & Dr. Flug (Villainous), Black Hat & Dr. Flug (Villainous), Demencia & Dr. Flug (Villainous), Dr. Flug (Villainous) & Original Character(s)
Series: Contractual Obligations [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1891201
Comments: 18
Kudos: 26





	1. I Was

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waking into an unaccustomed nightmare

[Music: [ Curses by The Crane Wives ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gopg80VXwc) ]

In a dark, dark multiverse there was a dark, dark planet. On this planet there was a dark, dark cloud cover. Beneath that cloud cover lay a dark, dark ocean. In that ocean there was a dark, dark hat-shaped island, and on that hat-shaped island there was a dark, dark hat-shaped mansion, and under that hat-shaped mansion there was a dark, dark basement. And inside that dark, dark basement was a dark, dark laboratory.

It wasn't meant to be dark. Now and then, torn and hanging wires sparked. Occasionally a few of the florescent lights overhead flickered. Most were shattered. Most everything in the lab that had been breakable was broken, up to and including the walls and floor and ceiling, all of which sported craters.

At one wall there was a particularly large crater, and a slow, regular, metallic thunking sound. Something large was repeatedly moving back a few feet and advancing again, colliding full-force with the wall over, and over, and over. A severely damaged Hatbot. There were pieces of other Hatbots scattered throughout the lab, but only this one remained functional in the slightest.

Eventually the impact sound became slower, and slower, until finally there was a grinding whir and the Hatbot scraped at the dent it had beaten into the wall as it slumped, powering down.

Some time later, there was another sound: a cough. In the darkest part of the lab, under a half-broken desk and shielded by an overturned table and a pile of destroyed computer equipment, something moved with a grinding of concrete fragments against the floor they'd come from.

Another cough, and a groan, and then a gasp and scream, because that wasn't the voice it should be.

Everything stilled for a moment. The lights flickered.

And then the voice of a dead telepathic heroine shrieked. "What the FUCK!"

When there was neither answer nor the sound of renewed attack, Flug dragged himself out of the wreckage. He unsteadily got to his feet, reaching up to tap at the edge of his goggles until tiny inset LEDs in the edges flicked on, providing light wherever he looked.

"...The hell happened?" he whispered at the scene of destruction that the lights revealed. And then he patted at himself, taking stock of what was assuredly his own clothing on entirely the wrong body, tighter and looser in all the wrong places. He groaned. "Oh, _fuck_ me."

He made his way over broken glass and metal to one of several doors, opening it to reveal a minimal toilet. There was a mirror over the sink.

Flug hissed as the reflected LEDs caught his eyes, and tapped at the goggles again to dim them. He grabbed the edges of the porcelain sink in both gloved hands, leaned his bag-covered face close to the mirror's surface, and glared. "All right, you," he snapped at what was most assuredly _not_ a paper bag over his head. "What is this. Why am I not dead."

He waited almost a full minute before adding, "Can you talk?"

Another minute. "Like, at all? In my head even?"

Nothing.

"Squeak once for yes and twice for no."

There was a resounding silence, and then, very quietly, two small squeaking sounds that could have come from nowhere else.

"Have it your way," Flug growled, and grabbed the lower edge of the bag, and yanked upward.

He was suddenly standing in front of the mirror, both hands back on the sink, a little dizzy. He still wore his goggles, but the bag was gone, replaced by a messy bob of wavy silver-violet hair tucked back beneath the goggles' wide strap, with only a few stray wisps aside from thicker free locks in the front. The harsh blue-white LED lights made his skin look just as pale as he was used to, at least.

He blinked, looking around, but couldn't see the bag lying anywhere in the vicinity. He raised a hand to his head in confusion. "Where the -"

He was standing in front of the mirror, both hands on the sink, a little dizzy, and wearing the bag again.

Flug blinked, then narrowed his eyes. "Are you _editing_ my _memory?!_ " Normally he'd never have bothered to question - it was absolutely normal to go on auto-pilot for rote activities and not clearly remember doing them, and find them done, in his experience. But now that he _knew..._

The brain leech backup system didn't answer.

Flug lifted the edge of the bag to remove it again, and again found himself leaning on the edge of the sink, a little more dizzy this time. The bag was nowhere to be seen.

He leaned forward, squinting at the lavender hair. The loose tendrils waved almost exactly as hair should. Almost. "Oh, you're _good,_ " he muttered. "I haven't actually had hair since you took up residence, have I. I'd wondered about why my hair would grow back but not my eyebrows, after those burns."

This body, however, did have eyebrows, and he wished that wasn't something he was getting used to already. Flug scowled. "Right. Why am _I_ here." He turned away from the mirror, debris crunching underfoot as he moved back out into the destroyed lab. He didn't bother to - well, it wasn't actually putting his bag back on, was it? He was absolutely certain that sometimes there _was_ an actual paper bag, but this thing was always lurking there underneath, wasn't it. Regardless, he didn't immediately have the leech re-shape itself again. This wasn't his face so it didn't matter so much, and he didn't care to risk whatever the thing was doing each time that made him dizzy. Maybe it didn't like the repeated activity and was trying to dissuade him from such, or maybe it was a side-effect of the memory obfuscation.

"This is still _my_ body," he mumbled to himself, walking around the otherwise quiet room and taking stock of the surroundings. "It's mine. I'm wearing my clothes. Something - something killed me here. But why'd you - why am I _this_ me." He knelt to inspect a few pieces of Hatbot on the floor, then climbed over to the lab's heavy door. It was sealed tight. "Something had us on lockdown. Something that could tear apart my Hatbots..." He sighted the more complete one slumped against the wall. "No. They tore each _other_ apart, didn't they. Some computer virus then?"

He made his way back to the crumpled desk and electronics, and began pawing through the debris. There wasn't an unbroken tablet or terminal in the entire mess that he could lay hands on - almost like the Hatbots had intentionally destroyed all of the equipment.

"...Ah!" Flug cleared enough room to be able to pry open one of the desk's top drawers. It wasn't much, but the portable AM/FM cassette recorder that he used for taking notes was there, at least. And there was an unlabeled, but used, tape inside.

Nothing happened when he pushed the button. He frowned and hit it against his hand a few times, then against the desk, but still nothing happened. He turned it over and removed the battery cover.

No batteries. None in the drawer, either. All his spares were missing. There was, however, an I.O.U. from Dementia written on a sticky note.

Flug's eyes narrowed. "Well then." He'd have to venture out into the Manor. Looking like this. He sighed and set about finding something among the debris to act as a pry bar so that he could break the door's emergency seal.

He kept talking to the brain-leech the entire time, albeit quietly. There was something weirdly comforting about having someone - some _thing_ to talk to that couldn't help but understand him completely, even if it couldn't, or simply didn't, respond.

"What happened to me that you re-formatted me like _this,_ " he muttered. "How did you even - you must have recognized _me_ as the pattern you're programmed to reproduce, too, so you saved both copies, didn't you." He awkwardly patted his hair. "Uh. Good brain-leech. Sort of. Was not expecting that."

So that would be _how_ he could still exist, but not _why._ "Clearly my body was still useable... when was the last time I ate? I'm starving." He threw his entire weight against the pry bar he'd found - an actual tool, near the door, which made him suspect that he'd tried to get out of the lab before. That was troubling. "If I'd been physically harmed you'd have either just healed me or had to get a new body, but that wouldn't explain reverting me to..."

Reverting to an earlier version. That was what you did if there was a bug in the code, if you couldn't fix the bug. He swallowed as the door began to shift. "Something corrupted the pattern of me that you'd preserved," he panted, lunging against the bar again. Some kind of brain damage that the backup system couldn't just account for or repair, so it had reformatted with a pattern that wasn't corrupted. "...This is bad, isn't it."

The door groaned and swung open, revealing further darkness. He tapped his goggles to brighten the LEDs, but the effort revealed little.

Venturing out without the bag just felt _wrong._ He couldn't remember being bare-headed in the Manor, ever, and while it did limit his peripheral vision, there was comfort in the obfuscation. He shifted his hand from his goggles to what passed for his hair, and found himself wearing his bag once more. The dizziness wasn't as bad this time.

Holding up the pry bar like a baseball bat, nervousness evident in his tight grip, Flug crept out the door.

The main area of the basement was in better shape than the lab, but while the lab's separate generator had supplied it with enough power for sparks and flickers, the electricity seemed to be out in the Manor as a whole. He'd need to take the stairs - the elevator would be out.

He stared into the dark, as far as his goggles' LEDs would reach, and heard and saw nothing. "5.0.5.? Dementia?"

Nothing.

"Hatbots?" There were only three deactivated in the lab, but there should be more, and that wasn't counting the prototypes still in storage.

Nothing.

"...Cambot?"

Nothing.

"Right." Flug cautiously crossed the open blackness to the stories-tall metal spiral staircase, waiting for attack out of the dark. But there was no sound whatsoever, apart from his nervous breath and the uneven shuffling of his sneakers on texture-painted concrete. He looked up multiple times, but nothing dropped down on him, either.

Where the hell was everyone.

Flug ground his teeth and didn't lower the pry bar until he reached the staircase. He held it in front of him in one hand, in what he hoped was a menacing fashion, while he ascended with his other hand on the railing.

His mind wandered - he didn't mean to, but he gradually relaxed a little, as he climbed and no suffered no attack.

He was not looking forward to death by migraine again, but it was already too late to forestall that, given where he was. Flug sighed. What would that leave him, if he could utterly avoid any use of ESPer Powers? Maybe a whole week? Maybe if he could get Black Hat to stifle the way he projected disquiet. Fat chance of that. He enjoyed the reactions to it far too much and tended toward an exceptionally restrained use of self-restraint.

No matter how he looked at it, there just wasn't going to be very long to figure out what was going on.

Flug stopped at the top of the stairs, took a deep breath, and spent a moment coughing because of the dust. It crossed his mind to tell 5.0.5. to make sure and clean here no matter how little this staircase was used, but that only stabbed at him with another pang of worry to try to tamp down. He pushed at the hidden catch of the door that opened into the Manor's entry hall.

The white noise that had been steadily growing as he'd ascended hit full force. It was storming outside, a roar of hard rain and wind. The candles in the wall sconces were lit in a customary eerie green that did nothing to warm the hall's appearance. Flug tapped off his goggles' lights to conserve their charge and crept forward, raising the crowbar again as the camouflaged door panel slid back into place.

"S-sir?"

Thunder. No response.

Apart from the sound of the storm outside and the occasional snapping or sputtering of candles, and the placid ticking of the ornate grandfather clock down the hall, the Manor seemed silent. Nothing moved but the snaking shadows of rivulets of water on the tall windows lit by flashes of lightning. That alone might have been unusual enough to be concerning, but with the electricity out, it just became more ominous. The further Flug went without seeing or hearing anyone, the more he found himself on edge. By the time he reached the foyer, he would have leapt out of his skin at the slightest provocation.

The fact that there was no provocation was also troubling. Since when would Black Hat pass up such an opportunity? Either he was out, or this situation was much more dire than he'd thought, and he'd thought of some dire scenarios to explain all this already.

There was a sliver of brighter green light to one side of the foyer. It took Flug a moment to realize that he was seeing the door to the study, slightly ajar. There must be a fire in the fireplace.

That meant that there might be someone there.

His breath seemed loud in his ears. Still clutching the pry bar in one hand, Flug reached out to push at the door. "S-sir?" A little more. "Um, I - AGH!"

Flug's tentative voice cut off in a full-fledged scream as something barreled into him out of the dark. He dropped the pry bar with a clatter as he was bowled over, shoved to the floor by solid shadow. He struggled, trying to writhe out from under the attack, before the weight on him suddenly stopped moving.

"Flug?"

Flug opened one eye.

Illuminated by the verdant flames of candles, Black Hat was looming over him, pinning him down, and wearing an expression of utter confusion. He had Flug's upper arm with one hand, and the other hand was... Oh.

Flug and Black Hat both glanced down at Black Hat's other hand, which was solidly clutching one of what were, unfortunately, his breasts.

Black Hat sprang right back off of him as though they housed magnets of identical charge. Flug much less gracefully shoved himself across the marble floor until he banged into the wall. Both of them shouted at the same thing at same time.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!"

They stared at each other, Black Hat withdrawn into the shadows and barely visible but for the glint from his monocle, and Flug simply panting and trying to get his heart rate back under control, shoulders and head mashed against the wall.

It registered after a moment that despite what had just happened, Flug was not being attacked or harassed in any manner beyond glaring. It felt like the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Things must be _bad._

Black Hat spoke first. "Flug, explain yourself! I told you not to leave your laboratory until you solved this problem, and you come out like - " One conspicuously un-gloved hand - dark gray and, well, hand-shaped, rather than black and clawed - gestured out of the shadow. "Like _this?_ "

Flug pushed up and drew his knees under himself, looking up at Black Hat but ready to prostrate himself at any moment. "It's - the situation is - it's gotten complicated," he tried to explain.

Black Hat frowned. "What happened to your voice?"

Flug sighed, and reached up to the bag to remove it, and found himself dizzily leaning back against the wall. He blinked. "There, I hope that helps expl-"

"Oh bugger, you're _her_ again."

Flug narrowed his eyes. "That technically isn't how this works." He took a deep breath. "Something happened to me and the - this - this _thing_ you gave me reconstructed me like this. The lab I was in is trashed. What was I working on?"

Black Hat shrank further back into the dark, his expression completely hidden. "You must have succumbed to infection," he said quietly. "That's... impressively virulent..."

"Infection," Flug echoed. "S-sir, what was I working on...?"

"A remedy, obviously."

Flug swallowed, mouth dry. He'd woken up to a plague bad enough that Black Hat had demanded he sequester himself until he'd produced a cure, and... something had gone so terribly wrong that he'd needed to be reverted to an earlier version of himself. Or perhaps the brain-leech had also been infected or otherwise influenced, and had become confused?

"I c-can set up in one of the other labs," he said, lowering his eyes, mind working fast. "Provided they haven't all been destroyed. It appeared that something had corrupted the programming of the Hatbots I had with me and they destroyed each other, probably the lab in the process." He briefly pulled the cassette recorder from his lab coat's pocket. "I seem to have left myself some notes, but Dementia cleaned me out of batteries at some point. I'll need to get more."

"She said she was off to procure such, when she left," Black Hat nodded, approaching again and extending one hand to help him up. Flug realized that he wasn't wearing his coat, the sleeves of his blood-colored shirt rolled up to his elbows. "We need only wait for her return. Have you rested? I know your tendencies."

Flug slammed himself back against the wall. "WHO ARE YOU?!"

Black Hat's face had been impassive, but he looked down at his hand and winced, rescinded the gesture, and turned away in disgust.

Every alarm in Flug's head was screaming that this creature talking to him absolutely could _not_ be Black Hat. Not with those behaviors. As if Black Hat would ever debase himself by helping anyone up, or suggesting they care for themselves. Flug squinted and pushed himself to his feet, wall at his back. "White Hat...?"

Black Hat made a retching sound, but didn't look back at him. "For hells' sake, Flug, I'm _ill,_ not a _lunatic._ "

"You..." Flug blinked, and blinked again. "You're... infected." Nope, he could say it, but he still couldn't quite wrap his mind around it. "What - you - you don't..." The foundations of reality were rattled. Black Hat _couldn't_ be infected by anything that could also infect humans. So far as Flug knew, Black Hat quite likely _was,_ or was responsible for, several of the world's major plagues over the course of recorded history, if not all of them. This was impossible. "What kind of plague _is_ this?!"

"Dancing."

"...What?"

"Well." He waved his hand, slipping back into the comfortable shadows before turning again, though he kept his gaze downcast. "You used a different word. The river. Mnemosyne?"

"Mn - mnem... Oh." Flug's shoulders sagged. "A memetic plague." Had it even somehow infected the Hatbots? The programming should prevent that, but... "What... what does it do?"

"Ah, yes, that's it. Insidious concept. To be honest with you I quite like the idea."

Flug's jaw clenched. "What. Does. It. Do."

"Well in humans, it seems to turn them into a reasonable approximation of a rabid gorilla. It's endearing."

Flug thought of Dementia again. "And in you it... does the opposite."

"That does seem to be the case, doctor." Black Hat seemed to melt a little more into the shadows, moving back until only the glint of his monocle was visible again. Was he... hiding? "Though I resent the implication."

"Of course, sir, I'm sorry." Flug tensed, speaking quickly - but the attack, or at least menace, that would normally accompany such a statement from his boss was not forthcoming.

"I operate with considerably more finesse than a rabid gorilla."

"Absolutely, sir. It was terribly poor wording. On my part."

"Yes."

Black Hat still did not attack. Neither did he disappear only to reappear behind Flug and terrify him, nor did his features contort and ooze out of the dark to threaten the scientist. There was no sensation of constriction in Flug's throat or crush around his body. There wasn't even a dismissive swat to send him sprawling.

Things had never been like this before and it was beyond concerning.

"Well." Flug nodded. "It would be the perfect time to ask for a raise, if I wasn't already in control of the finances." He tried to laugh. It didn't work. He felt wobbly - his legs probably weren't going to hold him up much longer - but at least the headaches hadn't started yet. And Black Hat didn't seem to be quite as inherently frightening as usual, either. Dr. Slug had described White Hat's disgustingly wholesome aura as being like sweat, and illness could alter the chemical makeup thereof - perhaps Black Hat's psychic presence wouldn't be the problem it had been, before.

"What about Dementia?" Flug asked, mentally cataloging. Identify issues, identify resources. "Has she been infected?"

"I don't believe so." Black Hat moved back out into the green candlelight a little. Flug couldn't remember the last time he'd gone so long without becoming distracted (probably intentionally so) by flashes of Black Hat's disturbing teeth. The usual battle with fight-or-flight response that defined coexistence in proximity to Black Hat simply wasn't present. This was terribly wrong.

"But how could we tell, I suppose," Flug tried to joke, instinct attempting to reduce the stress of the situation.

"Hm."

Flug tried to swallow and coughed instead, mouth painfully dry at this point. "What about..." He could barely finish the thought, a tremor of a completely different fear running through him. "What about 5.0.5.?"

"Oh." Black Hat seemed to relax, stepping out of the dark a little more. "The bear's fine. In the study." He moved to the hardwood door and pushed it open further, but remained standing to the side, evidently expecting Flug to enter first.

Very conscious that normally this would be a trap, Flug hesitated, then took a step forward.

Black Hat raised his other hand, stopping him at distance. "Put that face away."

Flug blinked. "Right. Of course." 5.0.5. had never encountered him in this body; the introduction should be handled delicately. He reached up to his head, and found himself standing right where he'd been, swaying with dizziness, bag over his head once more. Averting his gaze, Black Hat withdrew his hand, having caught Flug by the upper arm again. Flug shuddered.

Black Hat. Being considerate. Of 5.0.5.'s mental state. Of _him._ Clearly troubled by it but unable to help himself.

This was utterly horrific.

It got worse.

5.0.5. was blissfully curled on the carpet in front of the fireplace, and he was indeed perfectly whole and healthy in appearance, and for a moment all was right with the world. Flug broke into a smile under his bag, beginning to relax - this version of him, at least, hadn't gotten to see his son in a week. Well, a week and... however long he'd been nothing but a duplicated pattern stored by the brain leech.

And then Black Hat ruined the moment by walking right up to the bear and sinking his hand deep into the fur of 5.0.5.'s shoulder, blue tufts poking between his gray fingers.

He was. He was touching 5.0.5.. On purpose. Without even flinching. Without claws digging in. Just. Petting. Him.

Flug started to hyperventilate and had to struggle to get himself back under control.

Black Hat yanked his hand away with what might have been a guilty start. 5.0.5. gave a twitch, and then a noisy yawn and stretch, displaying his truly impressive maw.

Flug knelt on the rich carpet as 5.0.5. raised his head, blinking blearily and sniffing. The sniffing became more pronounced as his presence caught the bear's attention. "Baw?"

"I-it's daddy, sweetie," Flug said, voice strained, as he reached out. "I know this is a little weird but -"

5.0.5. gave a low growl, gaze flicking over the wrong-shaped person in front of him.

"- But it really is me!" Flug raised his gloved hands in a placating gesture. "Just - I - I have to have a different body than usual for a while, okay? That's... that's all."

The growl deepened.

"Look, look honey, Black Hat's right here, he wouldn't let anybody trick you, would he?"

5.0.5.'s eyes narrowed.

Flug's hands were shaking. "Okay, you're right, he probably would, but he's not, okay?" He raised his eyes to Black Hat, who had settled into his high-backed chair next to the fire. "Boss, could you -"

The growl was becoming a snarl.

Black Hat completely ignored the pleading, lifting one hand as though inspecting his fingernails.

"Sir, p-please, just, t-tell him -" Flug looked back at his beloved experiment, openly trembling. "- t-t-tell him it's me JefecitoPleaseI'mNoUseToYouDea-"

5.0.5. lunged, all teeth and claws and weight and roar.

And soft and gentle. Flug squawked as he was lifted into the air in a crushing hug, 5.0.5. standing and spinning them around with a happy rumble.

Flug did the only thing he could ever do when the bear caught him like this, that is, went entirely limp. "Oh thank god," he mumbled, voice muffled by deep fur.

Maybe things weren't as bad as he feared, he thought as 5.0.5. carefully set him down again and his spine cracked back into alignment. Black Hat letting him sweat was certainly much more healthy behavior, by his standards, than expressing concern.

"5.0.5.," Black Hat said, interrupting the bear's fussing as he brushed imaginary dust from his creator. When the bear turned, he continued, "Go bring him something to eat. I can hear his stomach from here."

"Rugh!" 5.0.5. stood straight and saluted, and ambled out the door into the hallway.

"I really need something to drink," Flug sighed. "I should just go with hi-"

"No."

"Of course, sir," Flug responded immediately, not quite looking at Black Hat - but the way his hands tightened on the arms of his chair was hard to miss.

"There's a nice fifties Cabernet Sauvignon in the cabinet. Have at."

"Uh." Flug moved toward the wine cabinet in spite of himself. "Sir I really don't think - with dehydration -"

"Oh come now it's got barely any bite at all." Black Hat rested his chin on his hand. "I keep it for clients."

"I didn't know you offered the clients wine." Flug pulled the indicated bottle. And had to wipe dust from the label. " _Eighteen_ fifty-two."

"It's been a while."

Flug glanced up at the bizarrely subdued Black Hat, and considered the situation, and shrugged. "Eh. What the hell."

By the time that 5.0.5. returned with an entire platter of pancakes, Flug was seated on the floor between the strangely heatless fire and Black Hat's chair, leaning against its side with his hand inches from his wine glass, passed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----------------------
> 
> I really did think that I didn't have a sequel.  
> And then I did.
> 
> I can make no guarantees about quality, or even if I'll properly finish (though if not I'll at least post a summary of what's planned because you know what makes me sad? yeah). But here, suffer my Thing for zombie apocalypses.
> 
> ...And please forgive me.


	2. Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it becomes apparent just how dire the situation really is.

[ music: [Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden (cover by Nouela)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uhiCQ0_Qqo), [ One & Only by The Tech Thieves ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmYCusutbBY) ]

There were metal walls pressing the air out of him, then tearing into him, and Flug hadn't the breath to scream no matter how much he tried. Everyone was laughing, at him and at how much he struggled and at his utter failure. And he still couldn't stop _trying_ \- but that was only another defect. If he'd only stop trying, he could be useless and led and comfortable and tolerated, instead of disappointing and detested.

But he didn't want to be useless and led and comfortable and tolerated. He didn't want to be controlled. He wanted to be free and appreciated and useful on his own terms, and didn't care if it was comfortable or not. He wanted to be _seen._

He'd never be recognized as he wanted, like this. All they'd ever see would be what they insisted that he was. If they were loud enough and said it enough times it would be true. So they were loud, and laughed at his hurt and fear, and did terrible things to him, and wrote him off, over, and over, and over...

_"So... it worked, I take it. The binding spell broke."_

_"It did." Simple acknowledgement, nothing more._

_There was exactly one chair in the study at present, and it was Black Hat's, and that was entirely as it should be, to the point that it never crossed Flug's mind to complain about sitting on the floor. "How long -"_

_"Years ago, now."_

_A thousand thoughts vied for attention and Flug could barely sort them out. "So this plague -"_

_"No."_

_"Sir?"_

_"Talk about something else."_ Black Hat's face was turned away, but one hand rested on the arm of his chair, and the wood creaked in his grip.

_"Okay," Flug mumbled, uncertain. "Um. This thing, that you - put on me. It's not a paper bag."_

_"Obviously."_

_"What is it?"_

_"Insurance."_

And over, and over, and over...

There was a loud booming sound. Flug jolted, eyes snapping open. Dark and green light resolved into the study, heatless fire still blazing. His head hurt a little, just enough that he could hope that it might only be from the wine, and not the effect of being in a telepath's body while in Black Hat's company. He was still pressed awkwardly against the side of Black Hat's chair - apparently with Black Hat still in it, given that Flug could see his immaculate spats resting crossed on 5.0.5.'s back, with the bear snuggled up against his creator. There was indistinct ruddy light visible in a thin line between drawn window curtains - morning? But it must have been thunder that had woken him...

Something cool was pricking at his throat and behind his ear.

Another echoing impact, and creaking wood. That wasn't thunder. 5.0.5. lifted his head from Flug's shin, making a confused noise and blinking. Flug realized in the sudden absence just how comforting the contact had been.

Flug also abruptly realized that the pricking at his skin was Black Hat's claws.

He squawked and twisted and scrambled forward, barely missing 5.0.5.'s nose, and somehow gained his feet and crossed half the room in one motion. He stumbled back against the far side of the fireplace and swiped at his throat with hands, and wasn't sure which was more shocking - the fact that he found no blood on his gloves, or that he'd been allowed to escape the contact.

"Hm?" Black Hat blinked and looked up at him with an unusually neutral expression, as though Flug hadn't just bolted from his side. The creature held a nicely bound hardback book in one hand, the other arm extending down the side of the chair, hand still dangling where Flug's throat had been. "Problem, doctor?"

"You -" Flug gasped for breath. "Lord Black Hat, sir, y-y-you - _you could have torn my throat out in your sleep!_ " His voice cracked into a panicked hiss. What had he done, why was he being menaced -

"Nonsense." Black Hat turned his attention back to the book. "I don't sleep."

"What?" Flug struggled to calm himself down. "Why -"

"I wanted to know where you were."

There was another booming thump, and it immediately became obvious what the noise was. In the foyer outside the study, the front door burst open, swinging far enough to crash into the wall. Flug cringed, disturbing train of thought derailed.

"HONEY! I'M HOME!"

Black Hat abruptly snapped his book shut, tucking it into the space between the cushion and arm of his chair. "Took you long enough," he called, removing his feet from 5.0.5.'s back - and nudging at the bear with his foot rather than simply kicking him aside. "What'd you bring me?"

5.0.5. amiably rolled to give Black Hat room to rise, and was rewarded with a brief scratching at the fluff on his chest as the demon made for the door of the study. That door swung open before he reached it, Dementia standing proud and holding up an entirely too deceased crocodile by the tail. "It's been rotting for _three days,_ " she announced, beaming.

Flug sank to his knees, the full weight of the nightmare to which he'd awoken settling over him once more, even if Black Hat did nearly look his usual self with the way he was grinning and salivating. The stench of dead crocodile didn't actually hit him until a moment later, and the subsequent heaving only made him realize that the only thing he'd had since he'd woken up in the lab had been _wine._

"Bawr!" 5.0.5. made a concerned sound and scooped him up, burying his face in fur that smelled, though the paper bag, like undeveloped woodland.

It helped, but all Flug could think of was that the shape-shifting brain-leech on his head even went to the effort to _smell_ like a paper bag. "Th-thank you, sweetie," he mumbled, patting at whatever of his experimental progeny he could reach. "Just - don't stop just - let me down a little so my feet are on the - the floor, yes, good, thank you."

"Well hey! Look what crawled out from under a rock!" Dementia had lowered her prize, but was still blocking the doorway and, coincidentally, the room's airflow.

"Hello, Dementia," Flug started, then wheezed and gagged and shoved his face into 5.0.5.'s fur again. He wasn't sure if he'd have been able to get further with his usual body and its deadened sense of smell or not.

"Wow, you really let yourself go! You sound like -"

"Dearest." Black Hat silenced her even more effectively than Flug was used to, though hearing that word in that voice was almost more cognitive dissonance than he could handle. "Why don't you take this treat to the kitchen, and I'll be with you shortly."

Dementia gave a delighted, ear-splitting shriek of a giggle. "It's a date! Later, boys."

Flug groaned as he heard her moving away. It cleared the immediate area, but now she'd be distributing the scent of that carcass through the entire ground floor. At least he remembered to shout after her. "Wait! Dementia! Did you get batteries?"

"In the bags!" She shouted back from somewhere down the hall. "Just leave me some of the little ones!"

"Okay, good, thanks," Flug called back, before trailing off into muttering. "Have to fix this. Have to. It's all wrong. Have to -"

"If you'll kindly finish with your latest breakdown, doctor," Black Hat said calmly, "Perhaps you'd like to adjourn to your room so as to bring yourself up to speed on the situation."

Flug cautiously patted at 5.0.5. until he was released enough to step back. The smell was still there, but without the actual source present, he figured he could survive it long enough to get away. "Y-yeah." Right. There was work to be done - there was still some semblance of normal, even if nothing was quite as it should be. "Yes sir."

Black Hat nodded. "5.0.5., take his food."

"Bwar!"

"Thank you, 5.0.5.," Flug added as the bear moved to a covered tray on the credenza. "I'm sorry I fell asleep last night."

5.0.5. gave a cheerful acknowledgement of the apology, as though denying the need for it.

"It was rather the idea," Black Hat pointed out, still standing near the door. "You're useless to me dead and yet you stubbornly refuse to tend to your most basic physical needs. Sometimes I question your motivations."

Flug's first instinct was to protest any doubt his employer might have in him, but he caught himself and frowned. "Um, boss, didn't you say something about ordering me to stay in the lab until I'd found a way to counteract this plague?"

Black Hat's scowl was very nearly as angry as it should have been, though Flug had the terrible idea that it wasn't prompted entirely by anger. "I told you to _stay,_ not neglect yourself and undermine your own work."

"I'm sorry, s-"

"Don't."

"Yes sir."

As he moved into the foyer, he caught sight of the cover of the book that Black Hat had been reading, that he'd tucked into the chair. _Pride & Prejudice._

"Truly, the End Times are upon us," Flug muttered under his breath.

Dementia hadn't been fooling around when she'd gone out to get batteries. There were two luggage-sized duffle bags bulging with car batteries on the floor of the foyer, and a backpack full of bulk packages of other sizes of battery. He took what he needed and paused, looking out the open front door.

It was tempting to think that what he could see of Hatsville wasn't much worse off than usual, but it really did look a bit worse for wear. There were powered-down pieces of the security system on the lawn, along with several vehicles that must be why part of the fence was down. Two of the houses across the street were burnt-out shells and there was further smoke in the distance billowing into the red sky, and much more mud and ash caking the pavement than usual. Scattered here and there were suspicious lumps that might have at one point been humans. It was a hot day outside - somehow the Manor was cool inside at the moment, for a sunlight-absorbing black building - but it was dreadfully quiet. Even the insects seemed subdued.

"Lovely day, isn't it?"

Flug jumped and squeaked, but was all too aware that Black Hat likely hadn't even been trying to surprise him. "Go on," his boss said, waving toward the stairs as he shut the door.

Flug followed 5.0.5. upstairs, glancing back only once.

5.0.5. trundled off after setting down the food and dragging Flug into another crushing hug. The scientist dug into said food - cold pancakes were still pancakes - while walking around to inspect the room and waiting for his computer to boot. This was exactly the sort of circumstance that had prompted him to hook his room's power to the lab's generator in the first place.

Years, he remembered Black Hat saying. Years since what was, for him in this body, the past awful week. He half expected his room to be unfamiliar compared to what he knew, but it wasn't so altered. The notes he regularly left himself on any handy surface were all different. 5.0.5. had even more stuffed animals, and his posted artworks seemed to overall exhibit refinement of style. The calendar was marked differently - there were fewer deadlines than he expected to see, but those that were marked, were written in much larger and heavier text. His crossed-off days ended in mid-May of 2023, so it was evidently some time after that date.

There were still juice boxes in the mini-fridge but he seemed to be out of the optimized nutrient packs he kept for when the workload was heaviest.

At a glance, his clothes in his closet were the same, mostly. The media on his shelves were pretty much the same. His airplane collection was _better;_ he couldn't help but smirk at that.

His bed was the same. He wondered, rubbing at the stiff hip that had resulted, how he'd managed to rest as well as he had, before Dementia's arrival had woken him. Luck?

He thought of Black Hat's hand at his throat, and the ghosts of hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Maybe not luck.

His computer chimed pleasantly, informing him that there were work emails waiting. For once, he ignored them for the time being, deciding instead to investigate the extent of this memetic plague disaster.

The computer's internal calendar said it was going on July at this point. On the other hand, it also said that it was four in the afternoon, and he couldn't have slept that long, could he have? So maybe the chronometer was off?

It wasn't.

The zombie apocalypse didn't look quite like what he'd expected a zombie apocalypse to look like. The internet was still functional, for one thing. Either someone was actively trying to keep communications going, or a sufficient number of systems were automated enough at this point to have simply not failed yet.

But while the internet still existed, it seemed to be largely silent. Traffic on every site he inspected had slowed to a crawl.

The quieting of the world seemed to have hit quickly. In about mid-April the headlines on news sites switched from the usual scientific discoveries, ecological repair, popular culture, and who was fighting whom this week, to a massive uptick in unexplained violence and suicides. Over the next weeks, stories about the latest scandal or catchy pop song to unite the world gave way to widespread despair and aggression. The number of suicides - or at least, reporting thereupon - seemed to peak and decline, but the utterly chaotic behaviors in general continued to escalate. There was no organization to it, no centralization, no control, no reason - just unarmed animalistic attacks of unparalleled viciousness (unless one took Dementia into consideration) propagating throughout the frightened populace. It seemed that as many as one in seven, by one government's estimate, had turned into permanent berserkers, and that was enough to lay the world low.

Once a person started on either trend - toward violence or despair - they didn't stop, even if restrained. There were no reported recoveries. And soon, another effect seemed to appear: the majority of people not otherwise affected simply seemed to stop caring. There had been videos of live news incidents ended by attacks and deaths, but by mid-May, the news outlets seemed to stop broadcasting out of sheer apathy.

Social media quieted to levels not seen since the internet had come to be in the first place. Heroes and villains stopped fighting; what crime there was went unchecked, but even the crime rates dropped, apart from the seemingly inhuman (and certainly inhumane) violence. People simply seemed to lose the ability to care to interact at all. This effect had at first been thought to arise from the usual quarantine measures designed to prevent infection, but that couldn't stop a memetic disease that didn't need physical interaction to spread.

He wondered if the apathy was actually an effect of the contagion, or a reaction to it - the memetic equivalent of one's immune system causing harm as it fought off an infection.

The idea was exciting. There were definitely profitable applications for this sort of thing.

Rule number one of plague marketing, however, was that one could never deal a pestilence without a cure. He'd been working on a remedy after the fact, so at least he knew that this epidemic hadn't originated from any of his own products. He'd never be so careless.

That did, however, make it even more concerning that Black Hat had somehow become infected.

He retrieved the emails and disconnected from the internet, swapping over to the BHO specific network. It was, of course, running smoothly - as well it should be, given the amount of work he'd put into safeguarding it.

On auto-pilot as he finished eating, Flug checked the accounts. There seemed to be no monetary activity, excluding automated transactions, for the duration. Uncontrolled plague simply wasn't good for business, but he'd known that already.

There was little point in responding to emails now. While some were entirely unrelated, most of them seemed to have been from persons convinced that the epidemic was BHO product and were inquiring about the cost of a counteragent. They stretched back into May, more complimentary the earlier they were, and becoming increasingly confrontational and desperate over time. The most recent were almost incomprehensibly threatening, but even those had tapered off by this point. And clearly, he'd been ignoring email anyway.

One early email in particular caught his eye. The sender was aliased to an apparently random set of characters and the subject line was blank.

There was no greeting or explanation - only a brief message. "The idiot's not doing well. Never seen him like this. How's yours?"

Flug sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk. Re-reading the email a few times did nothing to convince him that it wasn't from, and referring to, exactly whom he thought it was from and referring to.

He scanned the contents of the inbox again and uncovered five more subject-less emails, all with different randomized alias addresses, spanning the entire six weeks to present.

"Not good, I take it."

"Could really do with some feedback right about now."

"Are you alive? I know your boss is. Mine won't shut up about him. I think they're linked more than they let on."

"He's using words like "eradication" and "purification." Seriously this isn't okay."

The last was two weeks ago. "Answer dammit."

He apparently hadn't responded to any of them. He hadn't even checked the inbox since mid-May.

Flug fished the tape recorder out of his lab coat pocket, put in the new batteries, and set it to rewind. It didn't look like he'd accessed the network from the lab for some time, so his notes wouldn't be computerized, at least not online. There might be more information to salvage down in the lab - he'd need to check.

He started his third drink and set his empty dishes aside. He could tell that 5.0.5. had used a lot of the nutritional additive he'd developed - the vitamin flavor had been a little strong - but considering the circumstances, he was grateful.

The tape recorder clicked loudly, stopping as its rewinding tape reached its beginning. He pressed play.

And listened.

And when there were no more entries on the tape, he sat very still for a few minutes, before pulling off his goggles and removing the bag - or at least making the motion to do so, and finding it gone. And he couldn't find it in himself to care that neither the face nor the hands with which he covered it were rightfully his own.

He really had genuinely worked himself to death. He'd been so afraid of failing Black Hat, of failing to find a cure, that he'd ignored his body's basic needs for long enough that he'd quite literally killed himself. Voluntarily.

Black Hat had to have known. That had to have been why he'd all but forced Flug to rest and eat. He'd known and knew damned well that _he'd_ been the reason that Flug had let himself die, even if he hadn't directly ordered it. It wouldn't even be guilt at having demanded so much that had prompted him - Flug was certain that guilt was one of the emotions of which Black Hat was incapable. It was simply correction of inefficient behavior. He'd basically said as much.

Son of a bitch. _I wanted to know where you were._ Black Hat had been keeping track of his vitals, hadn't he.

Flug couldn't really be angry about it, he decided. At least not at Black Hat. He himself was the one that had finally taken it too far, not his employer, right? It was surprising that it had taken so long for it to happen, really.

It was much more disturbing that he'd grown so desperate that he'd felt that he needed to neglect himself.

The tape was blank on its reverse side - it definitely wasn't his first cassette for this project. There would be others still in the lab somewhere.

At least now he knew why he'd been under the desk. The Hatbots that he'd been using had indeed been infected, and he'd been studying the changes to their function that the infection caused by adjusting their settings, with unexpectedly extreme results. Presumably sometime after his last recording, they'd gotten out of control and he'd tried to hide.

Flug straightened in his seat, and tugged at the brain-leech so that it re-shaped itself, and pulled his goggles back on. The thought that he couldn't let himself have died in vain nearly made him laugh out loud.

If altering the evil content of the Hatbots' personality algorithms had influenced their manifestations of infection, then he had an idea of something that might influence living organisms suffering from the contagion. He didn't yet have the audio notes to know if he'd tried this concept already, but he could find out from here by checking inventory.

A moment later he sighed. Of _course_ he would've investigated that idea first - this plague obviously influenced the victims' personalities, so it would have been obvious.

Every single one of his modified Datura flowers was gone. According to the BHO database, they'd all been used within the past few months.

He frowned, though - their popularity as a product had held steady since they'd been added to the BHO catalog. He wouldn't have let the entire stock run out without ensuring that there were more growing in the nursery, and given the quantities reflected in the inventory, he must have made improvements to the nursery.

Looking into the supply chain showed that he had indeed made improvements. He'd moved the entire production. The now-massive greenhouse operation had been constructed on the mainland, in the middle of the continent, camouflaged among thousands of other commercial farms.

Well then. With Black Hat's immunity to them, the Datura flowers weren't a complete solution, but it was a good start. He'd have to find his earlier notes, now that he knew that there had to be more, but he could start by putting through an order to the greenhouse. The entire process was automated, after all.

The greenhouse's system pinged back that it was unable to fulfill the order, despite listing significant inventory. Diagnostics showed that there seemed to be no internal issues with the system, but some of the external components seemed to have gone nonfunctional. Flug patched through to the facility's security cameras to see if he could identify the issue.

Well, that was easy enough to identify. The greenhouse was a tangled wreck of scorched girders and broken glass, not a single living plant in sight.

The computer system should have notified him of this. There should have been messages, alarms, emergency notifications - and there had been none. He scowled - someone had tricked the computer into falsifying the data.

Another hour of digging through the source code, and he finally found the alteration, well-hidden and elegant. Someone had set up a self-perpetuating code generator that replaced the data recorded by external sensors with previous loops of data, with a randomized variance of reported conditions that kept the system from recognizing the loops. The order fulfillment robotics being unable to physically move due to the destruction was what confused the computer, not the hack.

What's more, the hack had several embedded comments - asides that did nothing to the code's operation, but were visible only when the code was visually inspected.

"Hey Flug.

"Sorry, PUG got here first.

"Kicked them out but sorry for the mess.

"Taking what's left.

"Not that it matters.

"Takes dozens of your flowers to even slow him down at this point.

"We can buy you a couple more weeks but then there's no way we'll be able to stop White.

"Be ready to run.

"If you're even still alive.

"- Slug

"P.S. Clarity says your coding needs work."

"Oh, screw you," Flug snapped out loud. At least that explained the high quality of the intrusive code - White Hat's tech assistant had been a gifted hacker before White had gotten a hold of her, and still had the ego to match her skill.

A quick calculation with the number of times the code had looped its data revealed that the alteration had been written a week and a half ago. Flug located the system's security footage and rewound it to the appropriate window.

PUG appeared to be a small team of villains wearing military surplus gear emblazoned with a hand-painted symbol of a hand with a line over it. Evidently a small-time operation, given the equipment. But the footage of the gas-masked group breaking into the facility seemed to glitch multiple times - they jumped from position to position every time it seemed like they must have tripped an alarm. He followed them on the footage from camera to camera - two took up station at the main computer terminal, one opening a panel to reach inside and -

Flug blinked, leaning forward. The bare-handed touch to the computer's I/O ports corresponded to the erasure and suppression of alarms even before Clarity's hacking. The figure was taller - that was why Flug hadn't recognized him at first - but it had been three years, after all.

That was Haxxor, wasn't it.

On another camera, a repurposed, decades-old military truck and trailer pulled up to the loading dock. The other masked figures - three of them identical in height and build - began loading travel-prepped Datura flowers as quickly as possible.

The chaos started with all of the intruders - some of the former Yolanda School students still fresh in Flug's memory - turning toward a single point, regardless of where they were in the facility. Presumably there had been some noise. One of them - tall and built like a pro wrestler, with light-colored hair sticking out from the straps of his gas mask - came running into the greenhouse proper, waving the others to clear out. That would be Virtus, probably. And that meant -

There. The lighting in the facility flickered out for a few moments, and in the dark before the emergency lighting kicked in, one of the gas masks' eyes seemed to be lit up. The second person at the computer terminal, guarding Haxxor, was Shadowshine.

And then the side of the greenhouse shattered, one of White Hat's irritatingly well-trained teams breaking into the building. Regardless of what anyone else intended, White's soldiers clearly meant to destroy everything they couldn't take with them.

The teenagers fell back, retreating to the truck with as much as they could carry. Shadowshine attempted to drag Haxxor out of the terminal center, but they stopped at the edge of the frame, raising their hands and backing up. Clarity entered the frame, backed by Slug, who was aiming an obnoxiously large and non-lethal stun gun - probably the most White would let him have for the raid, sadly, but an effective threat in this case.

They seemed to talk for a few moments, and then Shadowshine abruptly pulled off her gas mask, cyan glowing on her cheeks like blush as she said something to Clarity. Then the chaos in the greenhouse area interrupted, one of the robotic arms shearing through the wall of the terminal center. Shadowshine and Haxxor took the opportunity to flee.

The whole time, not a single alarm was raised by the computer. Flug wondered if Clarity might not be responsible for the elegant code after all. Not all of it, anyway.

Flug sat back, blinking, and realized he'd been smiling. He shook his head as he closed out of the facility's system and disconnected from the internal BHO network. At least he knew exactly who to go to, now, to retrieve at least some of the Datura flowers.

The raid had been a week and a half ago. Slug had expected to be able to last two weeks using the Datura flowers they were claiming to use on White. That left only a few days before, as Slug put it, they wouldn't be able to stop White Hat. He'd been right, so far as Flug could figure - they were most likely going to have to run, especially with the current state of the Manor's defenses.

It made perfect sense. Given how this memetic plague seemed to be influencing Black Hat...

White Hat was going to be a significant problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \------------------
> 
> I did not mean to take so long. Real Life kept getting in the way. Lots of it.
> 
> I hope this works for laying out the conflicts in this one, at least partially. :)


	3. Prepared For

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some Important Things are found, and Plans are Made and Executed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I had been able to write more consistently the past few months, I'd be able to _not_ post a chapter that's almost long as the previous two combined. But, I don't want to go editing chapters one and two to even out the chapter lengths, because they've been posted for so long already. So... the price of getting fic as I write it is suffering some of this sort of unevenness. My apologies. ^_^;
> 
> \---------------------------

[ Music: [Toxic by Britney Spears (2WEI Epic Cover)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL7IRngzIdk),  
[Betrayed by Dmitriy Mityukhin (Phantom Power)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I237ZiR5myA) ]

An hour past sunset, Hat Island was a little less dark than it had been the night before. While the sky remained overcast, and the power was still out over most of the island, there was one more light than there had been, showing through the windows of an airplane impossibly sticking out of a hat-shaped mansion.

Hunched over his desk, Flug scribbled furiously. He stopped, huffed, and crumpled yet another sheet, and started writing again, surrounded by an increasing flock of discarded wads of paper.

There had to be a way out of this. All he needed was a plan.

Goals determined the plan - if there was no way for a plan to work, slight modification of the goals often helped. Ask for fruit and life give you lemons? Make lemonade. Can't find an ingredient? See if you can substitute or make it instead. Can't stop a hero from following you to your base? Make sure they never leave. More or less. 

He'd already made a lot of modifications, and he'd only started half an hour ago. 

The overall goal was easy enough to state: get Black Hat back to normal. That goal wouldn't change. It was the sub-goals that were being problematic.

In order to get Black Hat back to normal, he'd need to find his notes for what he'd been doing the past six weeks. So, he'd have to search the wreckage of the lab in which he'd apparently sequestered himself. Given its condition, that would take some cleaning first.

Once he had the notes, he'd have to get at least one of the labs into working order. The system reports indicated disruptive damage in all facilities, so he'd have to inspect each to find the best candidate to work on.

He'd need help for the actual work. Inventory said they were fresh out of Hatbots, so he'd need to get the automated assembly line on sub-level six working as soon as possible - before looking for his notes. He'd need to figure out how to keep the Hatbots from becoming infected while he was at it, but to do that he'd need to identify the source of the memetic plague, for which... he'd need his lab, or at least an electronics workstation, already repaired.

So, modifying that goal, at minimum he'd need to be able to adjust any new Hatbots to compensate if they did get infected. Pinging turned up no functional control pads in the Manor, and inventory said that the reserve control pads were out of stock. So he'd need to put together more of those too, for which he would, again, need lab functionality - not to mention time that he was fairly certain he didn't have. He could churn out Hatbots and initially program them with the mainframe, but that took longer than keying each to a control pad upon production, and he'd only be able to do one at a time - they'd only be able to mass update after they were already initialized and docked in their charging stations. If any became infected and went berserk, it would be a disaster. Well, another disaster.

Meanwhile, he'd have to find a way to deal with White Hat - the source of the aforementioned time issue. Despite being insanely powerful, Black Hat could handle himself without destroying indiscriminately at the slightest annoyance - he usually targeted specifically, and actually kept his power under close reign. White Hat, on the other hand, had a tendency to lash out when provoked. He was nothing but apology and repair afterward, but clearly, the kind of control that Black Hat exhibited was not something he was used to. Flug had only a few days left, according to Slug's messages, to come up with some way to fend off White Hat; otherwise they'd have to evacuate to another facility, and that would mean setting up all over again. Maybe they should just _start_ by leaving for one of the mainland outposts.

Regardless, he was going to have to introduce Black Hat to the concept of following _his_ plan if they were to handle White Hat. Black Hat's current condition would probably leave him open to suggestion, at least. Flug gave a giddy snort. End times indeed.

"Bawr?"

Flug raised his head at the sound just to his left. 5.0.5. had sidled up next to him, holding a cream-and-gray stuffed rabbit (that had probably been white at some point) in the crook of his arm, and bearing a steaming mug of coffee, which he offered to his creator.

Flug felt a passing flash of irritation at the interruption, as usual, but the smile he gave the bear was genuine, even if 5.0.5. couldn't see it for his paper bag. Not that either the experiment or the bag were entirely either bear or bag. "Aw sweetie, thank you," Flug sighed, taking the mug.

"Baw." The bear sat down next to him, moving to hold the stuffed rabbit in both paws. He held it up as though offering it as well. There was a yellow felt tag clipped to its ear as though it were livestock. Or an experiment. "Wraugh." 

Flug didn't recall that particular plush, but that was hardly surprising, in these circumstances. He scritched his favorite experiment on the head. "Daddy's going to be working late," he explained, glancing at the clock next to his cryobed. 9:30. "You can go ahead to bed. Or were you going to stay downstairs again?" He thought of the way Black Hat currently displayed such comfort with 5.0.5 - even seeking it out, if Flug wasn't mistaken. Before, he'd wanted nothing to do with the bear. Digging into his fur the way Flug had seen him do earlier would likely have incited combustion.

None of this was right.

"Baw." 5.0.5. rubbed affectionately against his creator's side, then pulled back and held up the stuffed animal. "Bawreregh."

...Wait. The bright, eye-catching tag had bold black numbers on it - "333". That was the numerical part of the Manor's address. It was also the number Flug used in his personal coding system to indicate "home".

His eyes narrowed, the expression magnified by his goggles. Was that a coincidence? It looked like it could be his own writing on the tag. "It's really cute," he said cheerfully, and reached out to turn the tag over.

The opposite side bore the number "001". Basic danger. If he'd really left himself codes, others would provide elaboration.

He kept petting 5.0.5. on the head, and moved to scratching his shoulders, but glanced up at the notes posted around his desk.

Crap. He should've noticed sooner. Some of them were the usual sort of notes on yellow post-its, but some were on a slightly more vibrant yellow paper similar in color to the rabbit's tag, taped up instead of having their own adhesive, despite being cut to the same size. 

One note, placed directly in front of him at the top left corner of his monitor, started with "666," followed by a drawing of half the alchemical symbol for copper, vertically bisected. He patted 5.0.5. once more and stood, stretching his arms above his head - and looking about the room until he sighted a note with the other half of the symbol. The bottom of that note read "/f 54".

That was the same code he'd told himself when he'd faced his original, that last night at the Yolanda School. Black Hat's existence threatened. So, he'd already reached that conclusion, regarding this new situation. He picked up the coffee mug from where he'd set it on his desk and took a swallow, glancing about. Seemingly satisfied that the stuffed rabbit had received the appropriate attention, 5.0.5. set to tidying up the mess of crumpled paper from the floor.

There, another note, taped onto the side of the desk. Flug knelt; the change in perspective revealed a serial number tag on the cord from his monitor to his computer tower - with all but three of the numbers blacked out. And another note taped to the underside of the desk. And there was an entire array of post-its on the plexiglass canopy of his cryobed, and three of the dozen were written on the brighter paper.

_Being watched. Don't trust. Don't listen to her._

He seemed to have written himself the notes during a bout of paranoia. Her?

At the last code he found, he had to stop and take a few deep breaths. _Help me._ He'd been afraid...

It wasn't until he considered all of the notes together that he noticed the troubling pattern to the partial symbols that set the messages in order when matched. Copper, mind, extraction, transmutation, and steel.

The final symbol would've meant less if it hadn't been the logo for the shill company under which he'd been running the factory where he'd... Flug swallowed. Where he'd died at the start of the whole damned Yolanda School incident. Last week, for him. Years ago for the him that had left these notes.

Well shit. He'd figured it out. He'd figured out about the brain leech.

Of course he'd figured it out, he immediately thought to himself with a smug twitch of his mouth. He'd probably noticed the missing time - in order to not be found out, the brain leech would've had to have erased a week of his original self's memory upon reconstruction. Flug knew he would've worked backward from the unusually long missing time, and he'd likely found security footage from the factory that had told him enough.

"Not sneaky enough, are you," he muttered aloud, smirking at the "bag" on his head reflected in the cryobed's canopy. As expected, it made no response.

5.0.5., on the other hand, did respond, raising his head from where he was now bedding down amongst his stuffed animal hoard. "Bwar?"

"Ah - nothing, sweetie, just talking to - to myself, heh." Flug scratched at the back of his neck, using the gesture to play off the comment with a little embarrassment. "Sorry."

"Bawurgh." The bear snuggled back down and covered his nose with one paw, eyes closed.

Had figuring out about the parasite been the source of paranoia that prompted the original Flug to leave the codes, though? Three years after the incident? No, that couldn't be it. Something else was going on. He just needed the real notes from his lab that much more, now.

If anything, it seemed like he might have been expecting this particular resurrection. Flug frowned. Had he -

"Hey nerd!"

Flug jumped with a yelp. "Dementia!"

She laughed, standing just inside the open door of his room, hands on her hips. If Dementia asked for fruit and life gave her lemons, she'd take bites of each one, rind and all, while making direct eye contact, until life backed off. "Did you not hear me knock or what?"

"You... knocked?" Flug couldn't quite wrap his brain around the concept, and took another swig from his mug before setting it down on his desk, nearly empty.

"You're working on getting Tall Dark And Gruesome back to the gruesome part," she explained, stepping further into the room and shrugging dramatically. "Can't have you screwing anything up just because you're twitchy." She passed him, crossing to one of the small windows and looking out into the dark.

"Oh." He remained suspicious. Hadn't one of the codes warned _don't listen to her?_ "Well... thanks."

"No problem." She turned and poked at his (presently more padded than usual) chest before he could stop her. "Hattie told me what's up." She smirked and poked again for emphasis; he swatted her hand away. "You need any updates on stuff for the past few years, lemme know."

Definitely suspicious. "Thanks. I'll do that."

"I mean, like. Blackie and I got married."

His eyes narrowed. "No."

"Oh yeah, last year. On the beach. You cried. 5.0.5. ate the rings."

"I'll bet."

From his nest, 5.0.5. gave a sleepy huff at the sound of his name-code, raising his head again.

"We released crows and one of them crapped on your bag thingy."

Flug made a disgusted sound. "Are you being more delusional than usual on purpose or are you just that far-waitaminute _how long have you known about this thing?!_ " He pointed at the bag and realized that he felt like his scalp was prickling.

"Huh?" She blinked, apparently derailed. "That was always there."

Flug fought down the rising urge to scream. "Why didn't you ever say anything?!"

"Why would I? It's _your_ thing." Dementia rolled her eyes. "Anyway, fine, we didn't get married." She looked at him sidelong. "But we did get engaged -"

Flug covered his face - or the not-bag in front of his face - with one hand, certain that he felt a deadly headache coming on. "I don't have time for this," he snapped. "I need to get down to the labs."

"Good idea." Dementia headed straight for the door. "So yeah, on the subject of updating you -"

Grumbling a little, 5.0.5. stood and shook himself free of plushies.

Flug considered closing the door and locking it the moment she was on the far side.

"- it's about time for my next dose, right?"

He stopped with his hand on the door as 5.0.5. came up next to him. "Dose?"

"You know, so I can still be me?" She stepped aside, motioning him through the door. "I thought you would've left yourself a note or something."

"I did, just not about... this." He shifted aside to shoo 5.0.5. through the door, but didn't direct his attention away from Dementia.

"Hellooo, I'm infected, dummy," Dementia whispered, evidently trying to keep the conversation from being heard elsewhere in the Manor. "Come on, I want my shot before I get all emo. And keep it down, huh? I still don't want Hattie to worry."

"He doesn't know?" Flug groaned, albeit quietly, unable to keep himself from taking the cue. "Dementia, that's not a -"

"Good idea, I know, you said that before." She waited to walk next to him when he closed the door. 5.0.5. was already headed back downstairs, still sleepily grumbling. "The way he is now, though - well, I don't want him to get like the people that don't care about anything at all anymore, you know? The shots you made for me don't work on him."

"So you're trying to keep things normal." Flug was now pretty sure he knew what had happened to all the Datura flowers.

"Yeah."

"You know, I think that might be helping after all," he said, thinking of the way Black Hat had brightened at Dementia's return.

"Hot damn, did you just agree with me?!"

"No. Come on."

Dementia had hooked the car batteries she'd scavenged into the generator, discarding the previous batch by tossing them into a growing pile across the room. Evidently this was how they'd been keeping the lab power going for about a week now. It turned out that he needn't have taken the spiral stairs either - he'd rigged the main elevator to the generator. ("You didn't even try it, did you," Dementia snorted at him.)

The Datura serum - two dozen pre-filled syringes, so enough for twenty-four days, according to Dementia - was kept in a vault on sub-level three, along with a transcription of the formula. Generally the vault was for unfinished prototypes and plans that he needed to secure until he could get back to them, though he also placed some completed prototypes there for safekeeping, and clearly had thought it was the safest place to keep the serum.

He noted with embarrassment that he recognized a few projects that he'd placed there before the Yolanda School incident. At least everything in the vault seemed to be in order.

It made complete sense to have distilled what Datura flowers he'd had into this delivery method. A serum was more easily and safely portable, as well as a useful way to control the intensity of the foul flower's effects. Of course he'd worked that out - the memory of things he'd said under just one of the blooms' unfiltered effects still stung.

It made sense, too, that Slug would have thought to try the flowers on White Hat once he began to show symptoms, despite Black Hat's immunity. Outside of electromechanics, Slug's scientific abilities didn't compare to Flug's, but even when he lacked ability to execute a solution he was still excellent at analysis and synthesis. In addition, White was more emotionally open to begin with; it wasn't a given that immunity was a species trait. That supposition seemed to have paid off, at least temporarily.

It was troubling, however, that the flowers had lost effectiveness on White over time. Was that an indication of worsening infection, or of White's own physiology? Would Dementia build up a tolerance to the serum?

Might Black Hat respond to the serum, given his present state? Flug slipped one of the cases of syringes into his lab coat.

Dementia immediately swiped the other case. She removed a syringe and injected herself before Flug could do more than open his mouth to point out that there were alcohol wipes with each syringe for a _reason._ As it was, he could only wince. "Let me know if they start not working."

She brightened almost instantly, straightening - Flug hadn't even realized until then how subdued she'd become to the point that even her posture had begun to suffer. He could only hope that there was more suggestion and placebo effect at play than he feared. "You said that a few days ago too," she pointed out, snapping the case shut, but offered a shrug as soon as she remembered why that would be. "Whatever."

"Yeah, well, the order stands," Flug grumbled, turning away.

He didn't see what she did with the case. Probably hid it in her hair for safekeeping. That wasn't an ability he'd designed for her, but that had never stopped her.

They were leaving when Dementia stopped, holding up a hand. Flug turned from locking the vault - thankfully he'd somehow had the foresight to go for brain scan rather than lesser biometrics that this body wouldn't match - and stopped just short of running into her.

He tensed, staring with her into the open basement rendered shadowy by the few functional lights remaining. "Where?" He asked quietly, before freezing - he heard it to. A rustling and a faint rattle.

Dementia motioned at a doorway into a pitch black antechamber. Judging by where they'd landed, crumpled and torn like Flug's rejected plans, the doors had been blown off from the inside.

That was one of the Hatbot charging station rooms. Flug frowned, squinting into the dark as Dementia crept toward the opening - there weren't any functional Hatbots at the moment, according to inventory, but a still-mobile non-functional Hatbot could be dangerous. He fished inside his lab coat for a production model disintegrator that he'd snagged from his bedside stand, and tapped at his goggles for light/movement optimization.

He nodded to Dementia and moved to press back against the wall off to the left of the doorway, sidling toward the yawning dark. Dementia dropped to all fours, limbs splayed, and crawled across the floor - and up the wall, and onto the ceiling. Her hair inexplicably didn't hang down when she turned upside-down, instead lashing like a tail. She disappeared into the inky blackness, keeping to the ceiling.

Flug waited a beat, then flung himself into the doorway, aiming into the dark. At the same time, Dementia flipped down onto the source of the noise. "HA!"

There was a metallic shriek, accompanied by the glow of a robotic mouth, just before Dementia landed on the source of the sound.

"Hatbot-ler!" Flug exclaimed aloud. "Dem, it's just a -"

Dementia let out a whoop, apparently ignoring Flug. "Hey there little guy!" She scooped the small robot up like a puppy. "We didn't think anybody was still alive down here!"

Without bothering to correct her, Flug stepped back to let her carry the 'bot out of the charging station room. It was clinging to two broken halves of a control pad. "Trying to repair it to change your settings, huh?" He snatched up the halves, glanced at them, and tossed them aside. No fixing that controller. "You infected?" he asked as Dementia sat it down on the open floor.

It wobbled on its single wheel, but displayed neither apathy nor rage, instead cowering in place as usual.

"Why weren't you in the syste-oh." Given where it had been, the Hatbot-ler had to have been in a charging station, and had probably been power-cycling when he'd checked, so it had read as deactivated at just the wrong moment. "Anybody else in there?"

"Lots of pieces, that's all," Dementia announced, sticking her head back through the doorway and glancing about.

"We'll have to check the other charging rooms," Flug said, hiding his disintegration ray back inside his lab coat. "Well, we're up to _one_ Hatbot," he added to Dementia, permitting a little hope. "That's something." He patted the small robot on the bowler hat. "Good 'bot."

Hope was a mistake. The surviving Hatbot-ler was the extent of the pleasant surprises.

It was much worse than he'd expected. Every lab was utterly destroyed. Every computer, every control pad, every test tube and container, it seemed. There were broken Hatbots in every room, not to mention a few dead prisoners and biological experiments (though technically some of those hadn't been alive in the first place). Flug wondered if he'd ever be able to escape the smell of putrefaction at this rate.

The Hatbot-ler trundled along with them, making distressed little whirring noises at every unpleasant discovery. By the third lab, Flug stopped being disappointed. By the last, he felt numb. Dementia poked at every corner and pile of debris, but eventually even her enthusiasm waned.

It was almost midnight by the time they began to clear debris from the automated assembly line on sub-level four. Flug worked on the computer, starting a diagnostic cycle. By two in the morning, the assembly line was up and running. 

After that they headed back upstairs for food, at Dementia's insistence. She also insisted that the rotting crocodile was entirely gone, though Flug didn't want to dwell on how. Only the ghost of the horrid scent remained in the kitchen.

Flug set the Hatbot-ler to making macaroni-and-cheese amidst a clatter of pots and pans. He'd just turned to find something to drink when there was a distinct thump against the kitchen's door to the outside. He jumped and stared at the door, though Dementia didn't look up.

"Dementia? What was tha-"

"Shh." She glanced at him in warning, but the damage was done; he'd been heard. There was another thump, and another, and then a heavy scraping sound and more thumps. The door rattled under the increasing barrage, and a muffled banshee-like wail sounded from outside.

Flug backed away from the door. It was only wood on the exterior, reinforced with steel on the inside, with a small bulletproof glass window that only showed night, but that didn't make it rattle any less. The door could be the strongest in the world and it wouldn't matter if the hardware and frame weren't just as strong, and the noises made him second-guess the design.

"I was hoping it was late enough that they wouldn't notice the noise," Dementia sighed. "Don't worry, the door's solid. Or it was earlier today when I checked." She pulled a grape freeze-pop from the freezer, biting through the plastic tube and crunching on the cheaply flavored ice. "They mostly come out at night. Mostly." She smiled pleasantly. "C'mon, let's go check the other doors."

The other doors seemed to be at least as secure, but the thumping from the kitchen didn't stop, and more started up all around the Manor's exterior walls. Flug checked the security control room; as Dementia had already explained, the monitors showed that there were people outside. Lots of people. Lots of people driven mindless with rage, and probably hunger and pain as well at this point, all battering against the building and screaming. More were arriving by the moment. He recognized some of them as neighbors.

Flug activated the steel window shutters and headed to follow Dementia to the study. Black Hat barely left it, she said - if he wasn't there, he was in the library. He hadn't been to his office, and certainly not his room, for weeks.

It was as though he craved company now, even if he could still stop himself from outright demanding it most of the time. Flug shivered. He had to fix this.

The scene in the study was even worse than he'd imagined by the time he arrived. 5.0.5 had come back downstairs to curl up in front of the fireplace, cradling the tagged plush rabbit.

And Black Hat was sitting up against 5.0.5., reading _Wuthering Heights._ With Dementia now curled around him.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Flug muttered from the doorway.

There was an electronic warble behind him as the Hatbot-ler wheeled by, carrying a tray of bowls of comfort food, which it set on the credenza before taking up station in the corner, awaiting instruction. It seemed happier now that it had its usual functions to fulfill, at least.

"Aw, c'mon," Dementia waved at Flug, her chin on Black Hat's shoulder. "He's just to the part where Heathcliff -"

" _No!_ " Flug snapped, hands up, voice raised. "Just _no!_ I am _not_ going to be part of this complete and utter batsh-"

There was an especially loud _thump_ that rattled the steel shutters in the windows. Black Hat glanced up, sighing. "Which hero do you suppose it is this time?"

"Welp," Dementia grinned, flicking the plastic tube from her freeze-pop into the fireplace, where the green fire shriveled it until it tried to crawl away. "Who's left? I just got Flutterbye's wing-scales all out of my teeth yesterday, and Sanguinator liquified and I think Li'l Jack drank him. That just leaves... Amaze-o and Hyperguy, unless somebody else got through the storm."

Flug grumbled something about a zombie apocalypse where the zombies were the ones in danger, grabbed one of the bowls of mac-and-cheese, and sat down cross-legged on the Persian rug a little ways in front of the others. "So the rain is to help deter invasion?"

"More or less," Black Hat said without looking up from his book, turning the page with one finger. "I've been maintaining it to belay my counterpart."

Flug bit down on the fork in his mouth. "He's... here." 

"He's been out there for days," Dementia pointed out, hopping to her feet and grabbing the other two bowls of mac-and-cheese.

"He's already here." Shit. He'd have to rework his plans. Slug had overestimated how long it would be before White Hat was out of control.

Black Hat pulled a curved metal bookmark from his jacket, not looking at Flug as he set it into place and snapped his book shut. "Are your faculties impaired, doctor?"

Flug would have wished that Black Hat had made the comment out of annoyance, rather than concern, if he could have spared the thought. Obstacles identified. List assets. "How's the security system? I saw a couple pieces down." He wouldn't be able to electrify the outside of the Manor with only the current generator, either. 

Dementia sat back down, not with Black Hat, but to one side, so that she could face both of them. She helpfully set the second bowl in front of 5.0.5.'s nose; the bear snorted awake. "The rest of it crashed a week ago," she supplied. "It did really good, though! The kraken was having a blast until the zombies ate him."

Ouch. Well, it hadn't been designed for such near-constant use. Gratifying to know that it had lasted years until this latest disaster, at least.

"What else?" He glanced at 5.0.5., who was noisily slurping his food. In a pinch he could alter his experiment's size and loose him on the attackers, but the bear's stress-response behavior could become unpredictable, and if he were overpowered, he could easily suffer being killed and regenerating indefinitely. "Suffer" being the part that gave Flug pause. "What about Li'l Jack?"

Black Hat huffed. "The glutton's been gorging herself. Sleeping off the last wave, I should think."

"Hatbots are depleted, going to be hours before any more are ready..." Flug ground his teeth at the sound of another loud impact to the outside of the building. Inhale, hold, exhale. "Overall structural integrity."

"Questionable." At the look Flug gave, Black Hat added, "The Manor's what, two hundred years old? But it's not a concern. I've been maintaining it and it's not even fully in this reality to begin with."

Flug blinked. He'd added the entire sub-basement system without considering that the building above might be trans-dimensionally unstable. That did explain some things, though.

"All right, well, we should be able to hold out." Flug sprang to his feet, pacing, bowl forgotten on the floor. "I can get the new Hatbots initialized and set them to work as soon as they're constructed, but in the mean time, I'll work on clearing out workspace. I'll need to inspect whatever we've got left of prototypes and product to see what's useable. I'm sure that I would have before, but, well, things have changed. 

"Now the fun part, though." Flug stopped pacing, faced his employer, and drew himself up - though he still managed to seem more nervous than commanding. "Sir, in order to ensure that I'll be able to keep working safely, it's probably a good idea for you to go kick White Hat's butt until he leaves the island alone. He's the biggest threat at the moment, so -"

"No."

Flug started to sweat. "No?"

Black Hat sighed and wouldn't quite make eye contact. "Our abilities are inherent, but utilization is dependent upon our emotions. Given my own condition, we can surmise that White Hat is, at this time, incredibly powerful. Whereas maintaining what I am at the moment is... draining." He fell silent and waited for Flug to come to the appropriate conclusion.

"But - no, that's -" Flug swallowed down an unexpected lump of panic. "This is - this is _you_ we're talking about. All you have to do is -"

"Tell me, Doctor Flug," Black Hat said quietly, the brim of his hat hiding his expression. "Have you ever wondered what happened to my left eye?" He lifted his face enough to catch Flug's gaze.

Flug froze for a moment, but broke eye contact long enough for his attention to flick toward Black Hat's obscuring monocle and the tiny, almost imperceptible scars visible around its edges.

Dementia squinted at them from her position on the floor, nearly finished with her macaroni already. "So what's the fun part?"

"Plan B! We're evacuating," Flug announced loudly, turning away. Nothing whatsoever could physically harm the Hats except, apparently, each other. If Black Hat's ability to use his power was emotion-driven, and even he expressed concern regarding his ability to fend off his counterpart in their infected states, then the risk of failure was simply too great. He needed safe workspace, but not enough to jeopardize his boss' existence, particularly not when there were other options.

Flug had just thought of "Black Hat" and "failure" in conjunction. He felt a little sick to his stomach.

"He'll follow."

Flug turned back to face Black Hat. "If we get out of here fast enough -"

"Magical bloodhound. He'll follow, and he won't stop." Black Hat shrugged and looked at the closed book in his lap. "I wouldn't."

Crap. Slug had even said as much. The Hats were connected more than they let on - they could find each other.

"Right. Okay. N-new plan..." Flug lowered his head, pacing again, gloved finger against the front of his bag as though gnawing on it. How did one throw a bloodhound? It wasn't easy to cover a scent trail; your best bet was to not leave a trail in the first place, by sealing -

His head snapped up. "What if you weren't magical?"

Dementia barked a laugh and rocked back, clinging to her shin as though swinging from a bar.

"Then I wouldn't be me," Black Hat supplied patiently.

"But he wouldn't be able to track you."

Black Hat scowled. "Flug -"

"Hear me out!" Flug paced faster, waving his hands as he spoke. "We seal you - _temporarily_ \- and smuggle you out. We get to one of the mainland labs and let you out, and then we can just keep moving and keep White Hat further away until the cure's worked out. If we install a lab in a transport -"

"Do you recall the feeling of being trapped in a school locker too small for you?"

Flug was brought up short, hands suddenly clenching into fists. Dementia froze, glanced at 5.0.5. (muzzle covered in mac-and-cheese), and then looked back at Flug. Even the Hatbot-ler in the corner seemed to flinch.

"Being laughed at and left there unable to fill your lungs? As if you could have for the heat and stench anyway." Black Hat did not lift his gaze, his position deceptively casual but for the way his hands tightened on his book. His voice was low, a thrumming growl, almost monotone, expressing neither outrage nor sympathy. "And then to get you out, the noise and the way the metal warped and the _laughter_ -"

Flug pressed his hands to the sides of his head, eyes squeezed shut, shoulders hunched. He was shaking. " _Stop,_ " he whispered, and for once, Black Hat did as he was told, without even so much as a glare.

5.0.5. whimpered, breaking the silence.

Black Hat sighed. "I want you to understand what you're asking of me," he said quietly. "How do you propose this be accomplished?"

\------------------

The new Hatbots weren't ready yet, but between Dementia, 5.0.5., and the Hatbot-ler, it was possible to clear a space in the basement and set up one of the less damaged experimental rays. This was one Flug had found in storage during his inventorying - a system he'd been working on years ago, designed to divest superheroes of their Powers. He'd been working on a victim-wearable version before the Yolanda School incident, and apparently had completed that project at some point, but the original delivery ray was what he was interested in for this. With a few modifications and some prep work, it would make an appropriate, if unrefined, spell-caster.

As soon as he'd finished the spell design, while the others set it up, Flug slipped away to the lab in which he'd woken. At the door, he pulled on a pair of magnet boots from the vault - they didn't fit well on this body, but he lashed them tight with bungee cords. The floor was concrete, but the magnetic soles would be attracted to the steel girders underneath.

Then he walked to the middle of the room and activated the anti-gravity device that had been stored next to the boots.

Searching the room by its flickering lights and the LEDs in his goggles wasn't easy, but at least debris was easily pushed aside. It didn't take long to find his numeric code for "far side" scrawled in marker on the underside of the desk where he'd awoken. On the far side of the room was a half-crushed cabinet that rattled when he spun it in the zero gravity. For a moment he considered trying to get it open, before he realized that in the same marker on the back, he'd written "Musgrave."

Which would be, of course, a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story he'd always liked: "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual", in which the key to the treasure hunt turned out to be the forgotten final lines of a poem. It would have been a much shorter story if Holmes hadn't been high for much of it, but the puzzle was sound, and had required trigonometry to solve. "And under," Flug said aloud, and crouched, unlatching a metal electrical access panel in the floor under where the cabinet had been.

There was a magnetically shielded bag tucked between the cables, with several cassette tapes inside. He sealed the bag again. Goal accomplished.

He waited until he was outside the room before deactivating the anti-gravity device, but the series of resounding crashes behind him drew everyone's attention anyway.

For a moment he just stared back at Black Hat, 5.0.5., and the Hatbot-ler, holding the anti-gravity device up with his thumb on the button. Then straightened and tucked it into his lab coat as though he'd absolutely intended to make such a dramatic entrance.

"What was that?!" Dementia yelled from the dark above, where she'd been connecting the ray's cables.

Black Hat turned away. "Flug."

"Oh, okay," Dementia yelled back, having received all the explanation necessary.

Shoulders sagging, Flug sat to remove the magnet boots and get his sneakers back on.

\----------------

Black Hat stood with his arms folded, presiding over 5.0.5., who was chalking as precise a transmutation circle as possible under the demon's direction. Dementia had offered (well, technically what she'd said was that she was happy to be on her hands and knees with Black Hat over her), but Black Hat insisted that the bear do the drawing "since he did it right last time", whatever that meant.

Flug ran his calculations a sixth time, tweaking the crystal augmentation pattern for the transmutation circle in a computer simulation, though with the keyboard and monitor cracked, it wasn't easy. The Hatbot-ler moved the crystals in the circle accordingly. "Keep the alabaster where it is," Flug said aloud, barely glancing at the small robot. "Bloodstones east and west, black obsidian north, axinite south, selenite upright at the points, tektites in between... Add the carnelian with the agates in the center..."

Dementia had been relegated to preparing go-bags and keeping watch, partly because she kept trying to sneak rose quartz into the circle. Flug could hear her rattling down the spiral staircase for the fourth time since they'd begun setting up the spell, having disconnected everything possible from the generator so as to power the ray. At least the noisy staircase afforded him a moment to brace himself.

"All packed and ready," she announced, dropping a backpack next to the makeshift control console. Flug glanced down - as instructed, the bag was full of other full backpacks, shrunken for transport, with a size manipulation ray tucked into the top. He didn't look away from his work otherwise.

"Well, zip it up. They're useless without the ray so it's on your head if we lose it." He tweaked a few more variables. "Hatbot-ler. The carnelian's uneven. Turn it so the pointy end faces west."

He heard a sloshing sound and glanced at Dementia, then did a double take. She was watching Black Hat instructing 5.0.5. and inspecting the curve of the transmutation circle's Fibonacci spiral. That was as expected. The unexpected part was that she was standing with one hand on her hip, with a near-empty wine bottle in the other hand, from which she was shamelessly drinking.

" _Dementia._ " Flug narrowed his eyes - he recognized that bottle. It had been about half full when he'd passed out the night before. "Where did you get -"

"It was in the study," she explained, leaning conspiratorially close, as though Black Hat couldn't hear her. "I don't know why Hattie left it but -" She took another swig and giggled. " _Indirect kiiiiiiiss!_ "

Flug decided not to tell her that no one, particularly not Black Hat, had been drinking directly from that bottle. Let her have her illusions. At least he knew that given the modifications he'd made to her metabolism, any evidence of intoxication would just be her usual Black Hat-centric brain fog. "How's the Manor doing?" Even if it had been overrun, they'd be fine down here, with the only outlets to the Manor itself locked down.

"Oh yeah! No worries, siege is done for the day. Zombies all wandered off after dawn. Like, by eight."

"Well, that's good." Flug squinted at his monitor and called out to the Hatbot-ler. "Okay that selenite rod has a flaw. It'll throw the whole thing if it cracks. Do we have another one?" He frowned, glancing at Dementia again. "Eight? What time is it?"

"Ten-thirty-ish," she sing-songed. "Little after. So when -"

"Sir we gotta do this now!" Flug shouted. "Hatbot-ler, 5.0.5., out of the way! Sir, get in the middle -"

"What's the rush?" Dementia asked with a pout.

"We've only got a waxing gibbous moon so we've got to hit the nadir within a three-and-a-third minute window and this still has to charge!"

"Wouldn't you want the moon overhe-"

"Not for _sealing_ , duh!" He keyed in the sequence to start powering up the ray. "Nadir's at 10:41 A.M." He looked up at Black Hat as the demon took station in the center of the transmutation circle. "Once you're sealed in the hat -"

"- Then I'll put it on -"

"NO!!!" Flug snarled at Dementia with such ferocity that she flinched. He almost felt bad. Almost. He looked back to Black Hat. "We'll put you in the sarcophagus in the transport safe on the Hatship. That should shield you enough for us to get past White. Then we reverse the spell as soon as we get to one of the mainland facilities. Worst comes to worst the seal wears off on its own in a few days and you're free."

Black Hat nodded once. "I understand."

A green light on the control panel lit up. Flug looked down to flick a series of toggles. The ray fired, the obsidian at its point fragmenting the beam into an array that spread around Black Hat in a cone, connecting to each of the selenite rods placed in the circle. The ray continued, and the lines of neon purple light curved into non-Euclidian geometry in a way that lasers couldn't. Flug smirked with pride rendered invisible by his bag, regardless of the bag's actual composition.

"Doctor Flug."

He looked up from the control panel. Black Hat stood calmly in the center of the circle, shoulders back, head up, ungloved hands on the crook of his cane.

"5.0.5. is as accomplished a sorcerer as you are."

Flug rolled his eyes. "Magic's not - it's just _science,_ it's got rules, reproducible results, it's not like it's incomprehensible!"

Black Hat scowled. "I was saying I trust your work, doctor."

Flug huffed, exasperated. "Like I'd _be_ here if you -"

The whine of the ray reached an earsplitting pitch that caused the biological beings present to cover their ears. Black Hat lowered his head, eye closed. The ray gave a pre-programmed twist, wrapping the warped beams and drawing them inward, as though wrapping the demon in a cocoon, and the pitch of the whine shot into inaudible range that somehow muffled everything else.

Flug realized that Black Hat had meant that he was proceeding despite misgivings _because he trusted Flug._ The scientist's mouth dropped open with a sharp, intense feeling that may as well have been horror.

There was a popping sound like a vintage flashbulb, and a red light on the control panel started to rapidly blink, and what Flug was feeling solidified into definite horror. Across the circle, he could see that the Hatbot-ler was holding a selenite rod. A new one. He'd sent the Hatbot-ler out of the circle before it had been able to set the replacement, and the flawed rod had fractured.

Black Hat made a small sound that Flug, Dementia, and 5.0.5. heard despite the ray's noise.

The twisted beams closed and with a sudden blinding flash, the sound stopped, leaving ears ringing in its wake. Only the Hatbot-ler heard the wooden clatter of Black Hat's cane falling to the floor.

It took what felt like too long for vision and hearing to return. The Hatbot-ler warbled uncertainly; 5.0.5., Flug, and Dementia coughed, the air thick with grimy steam that smelled of sulfur and tar, so concentrated inside the circle that it seemed opaque.

Flug took a step forward, trying to see into the circle. 5.0.5. stood close behind, with his paws over his muzzle, and whined.

"Hattie?" Dementia couldn't stand it. She crouched at the edge of the circle, leaning forward as much as she dared, until she leaned too far and nothing happened - spell was completed. The circle had died. "Baby?"

The obscuring vapor dissipated, revealing the interior of the circle.

There was no hat.

Instead, there was a hatless man wearing Black Hat's suit, collapsed on his side. He coughed, raised a hand to his head, and went entirely still when his fingers contacted only a shock of near-black hair.

Flug caught the expression of shock that flitted across the man's face, and he wanted to die, even as the man's features settled into a comfortable disgust. "I'm sorry," he tried to say, but though his lips moved, there was barely any sound to it. With the bag, it was unlikely that anyone could have heard him.

The man's left eye was nothing but an empty, scarred socket. Dementia crawled forward, picked up the cracked monocle from where it lay among scuffed chalk and scattered crystals, and offered it on the flat of her hand. When the man took it, and met her gaze, she grinned and made a delighted sound, some question evidently answered. He hardly seemed to rise enough for her to sidle under his arm before she was there, dragging him upright with her arms (and hair) wrapped around his torso, cooing happily.

The man let her help him to his feet, but didn't spare another glance in her direction as he set his monocle back into place and withdrew his arm from her shoulders. He held his warm tan hands in front of himself, turning them to stare front and back, and in a voice not quite as reminiscent of grave-dust as usual, muttered, "Damn."

And somewhere upstairs, there was a terrible rumbling crash that shook dust from the ceiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \---------------------------
> 
> I've been having a very busy time in Real Life (tm). Because I want to keep writing despite the time constraints, I'm trying out a way of story organization that I've had my eye on for a while. The result of all the story planning is, however, that I'm actually terribly excited to write this. Hopefully it'll live up to my expectations.
> 
> Thank you, ye faithful who have commented - I thrive on your words!
> 
> Memento Mori.


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